Singapore PowerShell Saturday 01 Summary

The day was made possible by Microsoft who provided the venue, and SAPIEN Technologies who provided us with some great prizes to give away, you can check out the full schedule here. After starting out the day with some technical issues in the auditorium and moving to the a different floor, we got underway and the rest of the day turned out to be a great success. We had over 30 people in total, which was good for the first event of this kind but still a lot less than the number who registered. It’s always disappointing when people register but don’t attend, but it’s hard to avoid also. There were more people attending my Beginners Crash Course session than I expected, which unfortunately meant the other sessions had a lower attendance than we’d hoped but perhaps this will even out as we move forward. What was encouraging was that there was a lot of audience participation in the sessions and almost everyone bought their laptop so they could get hands on, it really is difficult to learn PowerShell by just listening to someone speak about it – learning by doing really is the best way.

The sessions were really well attended but unfortunately, the Hackathon track wasn’t. Though I think this was down to the sessions being too interesting to be missed and perhaps people didn’t want to work on stuff from their job at the weekend! It will be an idea we will continue to take forward and develop though because I really think it has value. I will be doing the hackathon at the next event, I have a ton of stuff to finish so I will definitely be taking it as an opportunity!

There was a lot of good feedback collected and we will be using this to make improvements to the format. On the day, attendees said the most relevant sessions were Managing Azure with PowerShell, Problem Solving with PowerShell and PowerShell Crash Course. There were a number of different sessions requested also and we will do our best to facilitate these.

There were a lot of people who volunteered their time to make this event happen, Kinda Lau at Microsoft provided us with the facilities and lunch, Robert at SAPIEN provided us with the giveaways, Wei Liang and Milton who volunteered to run the hackathon, and of course the presenters; Benjamin Hodge, JD Platek, David Lim, Triston Wan and Ravi Chaganti. It was especially great to have Ravi presenting for us, it was he who connected myself and Thiyagu Parthiban two years ago that led to the forming of the Singapore PowerShell User Group in the first place. We appreciate that. A recording of Ravi’s session is here, his slides are on the Public Share mentioned below.

Well Done to our Prize Winners also! Shahaizan Jamal, who spent the day working on his own project was awarded with a SAPIEN t-shirt and PowerShell Toolkit, plus a hard copy of PowerShell and WMI by Richard Sidaway. Vanessa Rose Castro won the SAPIEN Monkey, a SAPIEN t-shirt and a PowerShell Toolkit. We gave away a number of PowerShell toolkits throughout the day to participants and we have some SAPIEN prizes to roll over to the next event.

So. PowerShell Saturday 01 is over, the next one is planned for October 12 2013, emails and notifications will go out nearer the time. We will also try to work more with Mark Schill at powershellsaturday.org to align and integrate into their site. PowerShell Saturday has bought a new energy to Singapore PowerShell User Group and it’s really exciting to be taking this forward.